{San} Onofre's retired nuclear reactor won't be shipped

[slackmaster]

Looks like Southern California is stuck with a big radioactive metal mama fromerly known as the Unit 1 reactor indefinitely. With the continued buildup of shipped fuel at the site I'm growing more and more concerned about the potential for sabotage or an environmental catastrophe. The San Onofre complex sits on a short cliff right above the beach.

Amid growing concerns and delays, Southern California Edison has abandoned plans to ship a retired nuclear reactor from San Onofre around South America to a burial site in South Carolina, a company spokesman said yesterday.

The 770-ton reactor will remain at San Onofre indefinitely, and the permits and approvals the company needed for the unprecedented 100-day, 13,500-mile journey will expire, Edison spokesman Ray Golden said.

Golden said Edison, which operates the San Onofre nuclear power plant, was running out of time to transport the reactor to the site in Barnwell, S.C., by a June 30 deadline imposed by the site's operators.

Golden said Edison would consider other disposal routes, but he conceded that obtaining new approvals from state and federal agencies and finding a site that would accept the waste could be difficult....

For full copyrighted article please see:

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/uniontrib/wed/metro/news_1mi4reactor.html

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

1. I used to surf right by those things

Do I look a funny shade of green to you? :D

Yes this is the MESS that nuclear power is. I'm not quite so worried about terrorism as I am about an accident or leakage...those big buzzooms are getting old.

[hunter]

2. Real live people crawled around in those radioactive boilers...

Strictly don't ask, don't tell...

Heh, I didn't know you surfed there.

[slackmaster]

4. I know a man who worked as a "jumper" in Unit 1

Installing sleeves to stop leaks in one of the heat exchangers.

Not something a sane person would do IMO.

He used several different names so he could work more than the allowed quota of three minutes per day.

[Kolesar]

3. They took the Beaver Valley 1 reactor down the Ohio & up the Pacific Coast

In 1990, they decommissioned BV1 and took it on a barge down the Ohio, Mississippi, through the Panama Canal, up the Pacific Coast, up the Columbia and dumped the hot steel in the Hanford Nuclear Dump in Washington. I guess the trend is to send the radioactive junk as far away as you can, no matter where the origin.

Hey, I used to surf in a tributary of the Ohio (the Youghiogheny and the Little Beaver Rivers). Surfing white water rapids--that counts does it not?

[NNadir]

5. Whenever I drive down Interstate 5 past San Onofre

I am simply startled that no one does anything about the huge piles of dead bodies outside the plant, or the giant mutant sea lions that keep eating San Clemente, or the eerie glow emitted by the millions of thousands of cancer victims screaming in pain in the area. The giant mutant Abolone are however, delicious. The legs of the giant mutant Argentine ants are also a delicacy, assuming you can assuage the traditional taboos against eating bugs.

That radioactivity is nasty stuff.

Here's my big concern: I've been watching 1950's Japanese horror movies in which radioactivity reanimates dead people. I'm really concerned that the proximity of San Onofre to Whittier, California. I'm worried that Richard Nixon will come back to life.

[Kolesar]

6. No one in my county is happy about this nuke they built on a fault line

Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company built a nuclear generating plant in the eastern edge of our county. At $8 Billion, the plant has yielded us about the most expensive electricity in the country.

Just a few short months after it was "licensed to operate" by the fed, there was an earthquake in the adjacent township. The fault line is deep in the billion year old bedrock. I was at work in the next county about 25 miles away when the earthquake happened. It shook our office building for about a minute. The earthquake was 5.0 magnitude. The fault line was known about when they built Perry, but they built it just the same.

edit: the 3.4 earthquake was more recent. There was a 5.0 earthquake in 1986.

Lawsuit:
http://www.usdoj.gov/osg/briefs/1986/sg860127.txt

Public Radio segment:
http://www.wcpn.org/spotlight/news/2001/0517nuclear-power.html

Google: earthquake "perry nuclear" 1986

[hunter]

7. Sticking one's head in the oven...

From the late 1800's until the 1950's (and a few places even later) the gas people used in their homes for cooking and lighting was made from coal. This gas contained a large fraction of deadly carbon monoxide. Many people committed suicide by breathing this gas, and many more people were killed by accidental gas leaks.

Today we use natural gas which is much less toxic.

But the toxic residues of abandoned coal gasification plants still remain. Many areas where these plants operated are still extremely toxic, and the toxins do not have any sort of "half-life."

The solid and liquid wastes produced by these gas plants were a poisonous and carcinogenic brew of mixed cyanide compounds and polycyclic hydrocarbons. Much of this waste was simply dumped into pits surrounding the gas plants. Sometimes the pits overflowed, spilling the waste into local waterways.

Many of these abandoned plants have became EPA superfund sites.

There are comparisons that can be made between these old gas plants and today's nuclear plants. Spent fuel from today's nuclear plants has no place to go. It is generally kept under water in large storage pools until it cools down enough to be put into dry air-cooled "caskets" that are kept on site.

The problem with San Onofre Unit 1 described above is not about this spent fuel. For now we are crossing our fingers and hoping we will find someplace to put or recycle spent nuclear fuel before the San Onofre power plant is abandoned or "decommisioned." Instead the story is about the old Unit 1 reactor, which no longer contains any fuel, but has itself become radioactive from years of use.

The idea of moving this reactor somewhere else for disposal is mostly a "not in my backyard" political issue. Even if the human race vanished tomorrow and this empty reactor eventually fell into the ocean, the environmental impacts would not be particularly harmful in comparison to humanity's other environmental misdeeds -- for example those waste pits surrounding the old coal gas plants.

As a young man I practiced some pretty risky forms of anti-nuclear activism, mostly doing the difficult sorts of research that sometimes get people arrested. It's always a bit dangerous to pry "nuclear secrets" from government officials and contractors. Most of these nuclear secrets were kept not as a matter of national defense, but to keep nearby communities from knowing about dangerous and potentially dangerous nuclear activities that were going on in their own backyards.

I'm no longer an anti-nuclear activist. Over time I've changed my priorities. I don't believe nuclear power poses any overwhelming problem, and I certainly don't believe that nuclear power is going to destroy this planet. The vast waste pits of human ignorance will always be spawning novel ways of destroying life on earth, most of which will have nothing to do with nuclear technology. Lately I can even imagine ways in which nuclear technology might be used to solve other, more pressing problems.

That does not mean I support nuclear power, only that I imagine we could do much, much worse...

For example, the conversion of our oil based energy economy to an energy economy based on coal would certainly be an environmental disaster worse than any cautious and conscientious nuclear program.

Even worse than a conversion to coal would be a sudden collapse of the United States economy caused by energy shortages so severe that most Americans suddenly found themselves living under second and third world conditions. Cold hungry people don't care if the trees they cut down for fuel and the animals they eat are endangered species.